Journal Name:
- Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management
Keywords (Original Language):
| Author Name | University of Author |
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Abstract (Original Language):
Purpose: Global competition and ever changing customers demand have made manufacturing
organizations to rapidly adjust to complexities, uncertainties, and changes. Therefore, flexibility
in manufacturing resources is necessary to respond cost effectively and rapidly to changing
production needs and requirements. Ability of manufacturing resources to dynamically
reallocate from one stage of a production process to another in response to shifting bottlenecks
is recognized as resource flexibility. This paper aims to develop and validate resource flexibility
measures for manufacturing industry that could be used by managers/ practitioners in assessing
and improving the status of resource flexibility for the optimum utilization of resources.
Design/methodology/approach: The study involves survey carried out in Indian manufacturing
industry using a questionnaire to assess the status of various aspects of resource flexibility and
their relationships. A questionnaire was specially designed covering various parameters of
resource flexibility. Its reliability was checked by finding the value of Cronback alpha (0.8417).
Relative weightage of various measures was found out by using Analytical Hierarchy Process
(AHP). Pearson’s coefficient of correlation analysis was carried out to find out relationships
between various parameters.
Findings: From detailed review of literature on resource flexibility, 17 measures of resource
flexibility and 47 variables were identified. The questionnaire included questions on all these measures and parameters. ‘Ability of machines to perform diverse set of operations’ and ability
of workers to work on different machines’ emerged to be important measures with
contributing weightage of 20.19% and 17.58% respectively. All the measures were found to be
significantly correlated with overall resource flexibility except ‘training of workers’, as shown by
Pearson’s coefficient of correlation. This indicates that companies do not want to spend on
worker training.
Practical implications: The study provides guidelines to managers/ practitioners in assessing and
managing resource flexibility for optimum utilization of resources. This study can also help the
firm’s management to identify the measures and variables to manage resource flexibility and the
order in which stress should be given to various measures and actions. The developed and
validated measures can be used globally for managing the resource flexibility in manufacturing
sector.
Originality/value: In this work, the theoretical perspective has been used to prepare the
instrument from a detailed review of literature and then the study carried out using the
questionnaire in an area where such studies were not carried out earlier.
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